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Monday, May 5, 2014

Liebster Award (Part 1 of 3)

On Saturday this blog was nominated for a Liebster Award by Dan Head. Now the Liebsters are a pay-it forward award that is about generating interest in blogs that others might not have found yet. Which is really awesome and right in my wheelhouse since I've spent the last year on projects like the Great Blog Roll Call and the Best Reads of the Week!

The cool thing about the Liebsters is that just by being nominated it means that someone's reading and enjoying your blog. By participating in the process, you can pass that love along and help other bloggers find a readership too.

Bloggers participate by:

1.) Posting ten things about themselves.

2.) Answering ten questions from the blog that nominated them.

3.) Nominating ten new blogs of their own, preferably with 200 members or less, and posing ten new questions to the new nominees.

A lot of bloggers tend to do all of these in one swoop, but I've got a two year old hopped up on birthday cake who has a new train that sings songs I'm pretty sure the Devil wrote while he was on holiday. So I'm breaking it up into three posts.

10 Facts About Me

1.) I have given up three high paying jobs to help take care of my family. The first one I gave up so that my fiance, now my wife, wouldn't have to change schools from an in-state institution to an out-of-state one. The second job I gave up when I was in line for a major promotion so that she could take a job in Chattanooga, TN to be a teacher. The third one I gave up when I was in line for my second promotion at that job so that I could take care of my son when he was in poor health.

2.) In spite of the fact that I have grown up in the Southeastern United States, and have been shot at three times, I have never fired a gun and only held them on rare occasions.

3.) When I was thirteen years old we had a tornado dance around the outside of our house taking over a hundred trees out of our yard. It took me nearly fourteen years to stop being frightened every time a high wind storm would come by.

4.) I have joint damage on both my hands on my ring and middle fingers from the last factory I worked in. Before I learned how to get my equipment to do the work for me I, like most of the people working in the plant, would lift 48 kg (105.8 lbs) boxes by these straps on their tops. Only unlike most people I didn't want to do just enough to get by but to be the best in the factory. I would become the best putting most everyone else to shame - and they were shamed - but at the expense of my fingers. They're better than they were, but I still have days where I can barely straighten them out.

5.) Through High School and after I have won 15 first prizes in art. I foolishly stopped painting and drawing when I was in college because I listened to this crazy girl who kept telling me that I wasn't creative, or all that good. I don't know why I never looked at her and asked her, "If that's the case, then why did I always place higher than you?"

6.) I have fired forty employees over they years I've been a manager. You'll hear some people tell you that firing people is "fun" but they're full of shit. Firing people is a paperwork nightmare piled on top of heartache as the people you let go have families, car payments, and lives. It's never fun, but it is incredibly satisfying when they're stealing from you.

7.) I have failed out of college. Though if you ask me about it I tend to refer to it as "parting ways." Consider it a Southern euphemism and not an obfuscation as I don't deny my failures, I just like the sound of "parting ways" better.

8.) I grew up seeing my Aunt every day of my life but as she grew older she developed Alzheimers. I watched her go from being a vibrant, and powerful woman, into an old woman who lost the ability to tell reality from her dreams. In the last year of her life I couldn't make it to her nursing home - I couldn't bear to see her as she had become. She died and I didn't get to say goodbye. That's my only regret in this life.

9.) I have an irrational hatred of elves. I don't know why but I'm working to overcome it.

10.) I threw a bully through a fence and into a blackberry patch when he was picking on a friend of mine. I left him there and went home afterwards. He never bothered my friend again and wouldn't stay in the same room with me from that day forward.

Who That Talking Over Here?

I'm a blogger that talks about all my favorite hobbies - from video games, to comics, to rpgs, to poker, and everything in between. I can also throw more words on the page than a room full of crack smoking monkeys being guarded by trigger happy robots. And unlike those banana munching, tree swingers I actually make sense most of the time!